Bo Bayles Annex

Reverse engineering

You may know me from my Substack newsletter, Rings of Saturn, where I share my explorations in retro game reverse engineering. It’s been featured in publications ranging from Yahoo! Finance to a journal for resale professionals and Portuguese-language tech news sites.

One of my pandemic-era projects was to learn how to use Ghidra, the software reverse engineering tool. I first taught myself by deconstructing one of my favorite video games from the 90s, and then branched out from there.

I’ve gotten good at reading various assembly languages, navigating code bases without any function names or variable labels, and sniffing out where hidden things might be lurking. I’ve found hundreds of previously-undiscovered cheat codes, cracked a few passcode systems, restored scrapped game features, and even stumbled across a secret marriage proposal.

If you’d like to work with me on digital archaeology, send me an e-mail. Depending on the season, I may have consulting slots open. Retro game systems are my specialty, but the same tools and techniques are useful in other domains.

Software projects

I maintain several open source software packages. Here are the the ones I'm working on lately:

• more-itertools - Python library for working with iterable objects. One of the most-downloaded Python packages.

• boto3-helpers - A Python library for automating various interactions with Amazon Web Services.

• ada-python - Python bindings (with CFFI) for ada, URL parser based on the WHATWG URL Spec .

• python-pure-cdb - Python implementation of the "Constant Database" tools and library.

I've also been a primary contributor to gcp-flowlogs-reader, flowlogs-reader, netsa-pkg, obsrvbl-ona, redis-collections, vod-metadata, and  several other projects.

Professional information

I'm a software architect. I'm most interested in backend application development and reverse engineering.

• Current job: Principal Architect at Wurl (now part of Applovin)

• Previous job: Engineering and Operations at Observable Networks (now part of Cisco)

For more, see my resume.

Other output

• Personal blogging:

  • High Context Burning Rangers - notes on a nearly-forgotten video game (2023)

  • The lost car chronicles - never unlock your doors (2022)

  • The Fifth Iron - yo, I heard you like this one song (2021)

  • Yes, you can play it - an appreciation of The GHZ, where I spent my youth (2018)

• Tech blogging:

  • Being fooled by randomness - a lesson in how not to stream binary data (2020)

  • Yo, I heard you like decorators - using and abusing Python decorators (2017)

  • FTP, "Apr 26 02:xx", and you - troubleshooting on the edge of madness (2014)

• Policy blogging:

  • The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves - a snarky exposé (2017)

  • Till then, my noble friend, chew upon this - the followup (2017)

• Podcasts:

  • The GHZ Podcast - My friends do a show about Sega, Sonic Team, the 90s, and more. I have done sound editing for the show and appeared as a guest. 

  • Sonic Weekly - I have also edited and appeared on another show about the long-term effects of exposure to Sega games.

• Reference material:

  • Interpreting ESNs and MEIDs - on mobile phone technology identifiers, the most popular thing I've ever written (2010)

  • Calculating the Erlang-C formula - I was really into teletraffic engineering for a while (2009)

bbayles@gmail.com